With no fans, home ice advantage basically comes down to familiarity with the ice surface...ie quirky tendencies in regards to pucks coming off the boards differently in certain spots...that kinda thing.

Strictly from a Flyers perspective, finishing 4th in the conference and playing a round Robin to potentially get 1st seed? Nice...but to what end? We had the best home record by far and now play no home games? Advantage...rest of the East. We lose the most by having no home games. Overall though, at least the team, which was arguably playing their best hockey of a decade plus, get a chance to see what they can do. Very important for Hart to be playing games when it counts. He needs that to develop...ditto for all the youngsters.

I think they should have let each league decide what to do. Personally, I was roster experimenting, knowing I had a playoff spot already. Was also carrying guys who had favourable playoff games played at the expense of better pt producers. Oh well...congrats!

Flyers seem to fire on all cylinders when Laughts is centering the 3rd line. Hopefully that does not change if and when Patrick comes back. Where do you put Patrick eventually. Top 2 C positions spoken for...and Patrick's first round status basically rules out a long term 4C designation...I'm pretty adamant about Laughts staying in the top 9 though...and FCs post punctuates this line of thinking.

Realistically....even if a cure was found tomorrow, the FDA would take months to approve and the NHLPA would not let them play even if a few cases existed. A good guess is hockey comes back for the 21-22 season. Next season is seriously at risk.

I can see an iffy proposition of doing playoffs in the fall (give it about a 15% chance of happening) but the NHLPA will not go for regular season games, followed by playoffs, followed by another regular season and more playoffs...and rightfully so. The rest of this regular season is lost...period.